Political commentator Kim Iversen this week called for Congress to hold Dr Anthony Fauci accountable if he lied to the American people about the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

“Fauci definitely committed crimes if he’s lying to Congress,” Iversen said on Monday’s episode of “The Kim Iversen Show.” “He’s lying under oath and he should absolutely be held accountable for that.”

On January 8-9, 2024, the US House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic will interview Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), about the origins of Covid-19 and the government’s pandemic response.

The interview will take place behind closed doors. However, House interrogators will schedule a later public hearing to take Fauci’s’ sworn testimony. Fauci led the pandemic response as a lead member of President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force and President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser.

Iversen said she expects committee members to “be zoning in on the origins of the virus and China,” including “suspect” actions by Fauci or his associates in blocking document requests from Congress and “flaunting federal records rules” to hide the facts.

“They’re looking for a transparent accounting of what he knew, how he knew, from whom did he know,” she said.

Fauci and his lawyer have delayed his appearance before Congress since the subcommittee requested it in February. Iversen cited “increasing evidence that seems to point to Fauci having knowledge and covering things up.”

She said of particular interest is Fauci’s role as NIAID director in funding dangerous “gain-of-function” research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute for Virology.

Quoting Senator Rand Paul (Republican-Kentucky), Iversen said Congress must learn why and how Fauci persuaded scientists to change their minds on a likely lab leak of the coronavirus from the Wuhan lab and rapidly reverse their position in a 2020 article in Nature Medicine, commissioned and edited by Fauci, arguing that a Covid-19 lab origin was “improbable.”

Iversen said Congress must demand answers from Fauci.

“We still have not received some answers to some of these things that are really suspect,” she said. We’re not getting to the bottom of it.”

She played a snippet of a Fox News interview with Paul, who said Fauci directed “an orchestrated cover-up.”

“He commissioned scientists who were saying in private that they thought it was a manipulated virus, manipulated in a lab and came from a lab,” Paul said.

Paul also said Fauci “was visiting the CIA in early 2020” and seven CIA scientists “voted 6 to 1 to say it came from a lab, and then they were reversed by superiors.”

“We need to know whether Antony Fauci influenced the superiors, or perhaps … did the CIA influence Anthony Fauci? We also need to know how often he was visiting and what he was there for. Our understanding is that he wasn’t recorded on visitor logs, but he was appearing frequently with the CIA.”

Paul said Congress hasn’t been able to get a scrap of information on Fauci’s high-level government discussions on dangerous bioweapons, despite three years of requesting them.

Iversen, who previously demanded answers from Fauci, and questioned why he wasn’t fired for lying to Congress during the pandemic, said, “It’s good that Rand Paul and others are still on this.”

“I know a lot of us have moved on from the pandemic, we just want to live our lives and forget about this terrible time,” Iversen said. “But it’s extremely important that we continue holding these guys’ feet to the fire — that we continue to hold them accountable.”

• The Defender report